Michael Drebert

Michael Drebert is a young Vancouver artist who thus far has concentrated on making things that do not work. For a group show at the Western Front in 2005, he displayed the pin from a door hinge, on a plinth. The pin was from a door somewhere in the building. For the same exhibition, he boiled down a bottle of Canadian Club rye to remove the alcohol, then replaced the liquid in the bottle. Drebert’s art brings to mind Bill Brown’s influential essay “Thing Theory,” which declares: “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us.” For Drebert, objects became things.

But Drebert’s latest piece is different. Styrofoam Huffer, 2008, comprises a sculpture of one galvanized garbage can on top of another, two sets of smokestacks, and a portion of the gallery room sealed off in transparent polyurethane. The contraption is a rudimentary machine for boiling down Styrofoam: A door is cut into the bottom can, which would hold fuel; the top can is for the melting foam; vapors would escape into the sealed-off room. This description is conditional, however, for the piece is actually pristine and unused. The sculpture, that is, while designed to make use of waste material, itself is not very useful, and not only because the vapors are highly toxic. After all, many of the substances we ingest, inhale, or consume are toxic. And as noted above, it seems as if Drebert’s art has shifted from its earlier uselessness, from the way in which it took something that worked and made it not work. Here, instead, what seems to work or not work is narrative. In many ways, this installation resembles 1990s-era grunge art, down to the price stickers left on the garbage cans. But what is compelling is how even the laborious process of turning Styrofoam into a hallucinogen, of huffing it, now doesn’t work, either. Drebert apparently was inspired to make Styrofoam Huffer after seeing a documentary about abject African children who did, in fact, huff Styrofoam. But we don’t need Styrofoam to get high in the West: We have art for that. Drebert knows this, which is why, perhaps, he has made this work.